"Well, it's not quite a mop and it's not quite a puppet… but man (laughs). So to answer your question, I don't know." – Homer Simpson, "A Fish Called Selma"

How To Make Your Facebook Status Appear On Twitter

If you check out my Facebook profile, you’ll notice my status listed in the upper-right corner. Through guile, cunning and a little research (backed up by very little technical know-how) I’ve been able to update that status on Facebook and have that status appear as a Twitter “tweet”.

Wanna know how I did it? Read on!

First off, I scoured Google and found two great resources for doing things I didn’t want to do:

This hack uses Facebook’s Status RSS feed from your friends and a service called Twitterfeed to push their status (not yours) to Twitter. It’s not ideal because their individual entries/status/identities get munged together under a new Twitter account you create.

I want to do the opposite. I want MY status on Facebook to be parsed to Twitter as MY twitter identity to those following ME on twitter. That way I only have to update one “status”.

Stuart wrote a PHP script, Twitterbook, that you could run from your blog host and send updates to both sources from that script. Useful, but if you’re already logged into one or both services, why not take advantage of their systems?

So here are the steps I took:

Go to Facebook your profile

Under your Mini-Feed click â€œSee Allâ€

Click on Status Stories

You will see a link labeled â€œMy Statusâ€ under the View menu, copy this URL

Go to Twitterfeed (no need to create a new Twitter account per their instructions, you’ll be using your own) and login (you many need an OpenID)

Set all the settings (your Twitter username/password and how often you’d like Twitterfeed to check your Facebook status)

Update your Facebook status and see that it posts to Twitter

There are some minor quibbles with this method.

First, you’re giving your login information to twitterfeed, which is less than ideal. Second, they’ll only check once every 30 minutes, so your “tweets”/status updates might be a little delayed. Lastly, the RSS that Facebook publishes as your status includes the prefix “[First Name] is” so your Facebook-derived statuses/Twitter tweets all sound like you’re speaking in the third person.

Having said that, if you’re someone who doesn’t want to do multiple status updates (or even run the Twitter app in Facebook and copy/paste all your status updates), this is a good solution.

I’m not really trying to re-hash the Clintonian parsing of the verb of being, I just like the allusion. Instead, I’m here to tell all you troubled souls – 66,523 members at my most recent count – that your efforts, our efforts, have not bee…